Synopsis: A faceless enemy is pursuing the Doctor, erasing his history--an enemy that knows his every move. Leaving Ace in safe hands as he attempts to find out who this enemy is, the TARDIS is drawn to London in 1888...

Matrix is the latest book by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker, set
immediately after their previous book, the below average Illegal Alien. They have clearly considered that book's
strengths and weaknesses, thus producing one of the better BBC books so
far.

Whilst Illegal Alien was a pastiche
of much of the seventh Doctor's time on television, Matrix contains
many elements for '90s Who -- the scenes set in an alternate
universe are incredibly similar to Timewyrm:
Exodus, whilst Victorian London and Ace all on her own are
recognisable in far too many of the Virgin NAs. Other elements are also
familiar as the story develops towards it's apocalyptic climax.

Were it not for the nature of the story's setting -- London at the
time of the Ripper murders -- this story could easily have appeared in
Season 27, had it hit our screens back in 1990. The setting is small
enough, the story is based more on character than action and the BBC
costume and design departments have frequently proven their ability to
reproduce this period. Perry and Tucker successfully describe everything
without bogging down the story, and it's easy to imagine Sylvester and
Sophie pouring their usual energy into their parts.

Unfortunately, there is a major downside to the whole story, and it
comes at the climax, when the true foe is revealed. His background is
weak, his fate uncertain, and there's a 'blink and you'll miss it'
resolution (an unfortunate similarity to several Virgin NAs). And the
title itself has exactly the same problem as 'The Wolves of Fenric', but
unlike that one, it hasn't been changed. The cover is just plain weird,
and really should have Ace on it, given her major role in the storyline. A
definite improvement on Illegal Alien,
though, and I look forward to Perry and Tucker's next book. 7/10

Robert Perry and Michael Tucker's last effort, Illegal Alien left me completely cold, I felt a bit of
uncertainty as I picked up their latest offering, Matrix.

But I've got to admit that the first hundred pages were crisp,
intelligently written and thoroughly enjoyable. However, the second
hundred pages are tedious, dull and reptitive failing to advance the plot
and making the entire book until the dramatic revelation of just who the
villain of the story is.

In short, it's a major disappointment.

Which is a shame really since they bring up some really nice ideas.
Such as seeing the usually controlled, self-assured, maniuplative seventh
Doctor facing an enemy that is unknown to him and instills him with fear.
Or seeing an world where time has been skewered and how it affects some
old familiar faces.

It's just once the Doctor traces down the source of the evil in
Victorian London and sends the TARDIS back in time to deal with it that
the entire narrative emphasis derails. The Doctor disppears, the TARDIS is
taken from them, and Ace is left to fend for herself. Before you know it,
she's suspected of murder and the Doctor is no where to be seen and
there's an evil force at work in the city. All three plots muddle along
at a snail's pace for the middle section until they awkwardly slam
together in the final stages of the novel.

Part of the problem is that Perry and Tucker re-examine things that
were done much better in the best of the Virgin NAs and MAs. (To name
them here might give away vital plot points and I don't want to do that).

Read the first hundred page or so and then skip forward to page 200
and keep going from there. Otherwise, avoid Matrix and save the
money for Infinity Doctors.

I've long since given up trying to predict what BBC Books will give us
next. Perhaps you thought they'd run out of surprises? Wrong. For their
latest trick, the BBC have given us a novel so evocative of the worst of
Virgin that one starts to wonder if they're doing it deliberately. (The
answer, I think, is yes... but there's more to it than that).

This book reminds me of The Pit and Man in the Velvet Mask - which is a sentence I hoped I'd
never have to write. It's a confusing, aimless novel set in Earth's
history which may or may not involve parallel universes but certainly has
lashings of horrible pointless cruelty. It supposedly stars the seventh
Doctor, but it shows us a side of him we never saw on TV. This Doctor is
unsettled, angst-ridden, distracted or just plain missing. You don't know
what's going on. It's not always easy even to CARE. It's better than the
two Virgin books I mentioned, but that's not saying very much.

The problem with Matrix is that very little happens. The
goodies are largely inactive - as indeed are the baddies! Instead we just
have lots of confusing chapters that don't seem to go anywhere, starring
characters of unclear motivation and presentation. The reader has no idea
what our heroes should be trying to do, and nor do the heroes. A scene
that sums up this problem comes when a policeman tries to arrest Ace.
This could have been really dramatic, making Ace choose whether or not to
sacrifice herself, but in the end the decision is taken out of her hands!
The bad guy deals with it himself and Ace is left a passive onlooker!

This book isn't deep, just Virginesque. If it weren't for Ace, this
book would fit perfectly into the late Darvill-Evans era. Scenes are
written from the viewpoint of unknown characters, referred to only as
"him". This is deliberately disorientating.

Of course if you're going to reject the conventional adventure formula
then you need something to put in its place. At least The
Pit managed to evoke a genuinely epic scale amidst the horror. Man in the Velvet Mask gave us a world of pointless
sadism, richly detailed and utterly repellent. What does Matrix
do?

Not much, to be blunt. This novel does not sing with poetry.
Admittedly it acknowledges the rich history of London, as is right and
proper for authors who've clearly been reading their Peter Ackroyd. They
even name a character after him! It is also rooted deeply in the history
of Doctor Who itself, tying together all kinds of strands to make a
rich and slightly peculiar tapestry that might perhaps baffle a non-fan.
This is an important point I'll return to later. The atmosphere does
sometimes get creepy, reminding this reader slightly of James Herbert, and
it should hardly need saying that it taxes the brain. Reading this book
is an Experience.

Most obviously, however, Matrix uses Jack the Ripper. Oh,
whoopie-doo. Didn't Birthright use the Ripper murders
too? The Pit certainly did. Jack the Ripper is fast
becoming the Atlantis of the Who novels - a popular mystery fated
to be explained over and over again by successive generations of authors.
One sometimes starts to wonder if Jack the Ripper escaped into the Land of
Fiction in order to insinuate himself into as many 20th century works of
fiction as possible. I've read Alan Moore's From Hell (and I suspect Perry
and Tucker have too). We've seen Ripper crossovers with Batman, Judge
Dredd, John Constantine, Sherlock Holmes and for all I know Luke Skywalker
and Biggles. What's so great about Jack, I ask? So he's the father of
modern serial killers. Gee. Let's give him his own feast day; just don't
make us read any more books about him. This particular interpretation
isn't actually bad; in fact it's original and imaginative, but I would
sooner let sleeping corpses lie. Please, let's all ow poor eviscerated
Mary Ann Nicholls, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and
Mary Kelly to rest in peace.

"Why is everybody obsessed with Jack the Ripper?" asks a character on
page 179. I asked the same question...

But having said all that, Matrix is far more than just a
throwback to Virgin. I said that it pulls together threads from all of
Doctor Who's history, but it does so especially with the McCoy era.
Ace is unquestionably the TV version, continued from Survival, and when the Doctor finally returns properly
to the book then it's such a breath of fresh air. This is the living,
breathing character we know and love, and his appearance gives the story a
healthy kick up the backside. He's just so much more INTERESTING to read
about than the confusing randomness of Tucker and Perry's devising.

On top of that are a host of TVM references: an
obsession with clocks, an amnesiac hero, a cameo from McGann and something
else I can't mention because it's a spoiler. Matrix gathers
together these disparate adventures of the seventh Doctor and ties them
together with a bow on top. This isn't just a homage to the Virgin
stories, but a improvisation upon them. Perry and Tucker cheerfully steal
themes and ideas from the entire Darvill-Evans era, raiding the Timewyrm saga and the Future History
Cycle right through to the Alternate Universe
stories. Their audacity is breathtaking. What Peter Darvill-Evans
took three years to do, Perry and Tucker gaily skim in 280 pages. I can't
go into details because that would spoil the story, but you'll know it
when you see it...

Not satisfied with that, Perry and Tucker even contradict Virgin,
ambiguously reintroducing the new surname they gave Ace in Short Trips.
This is clearly a girl who collects surnames - Gale for the BBC, McShane
in the NAs and Sorinova-McShane in Happy Endings, courtesy of the epilogue
to the Curse of Fenric novelisation. Jon Blum's
theory is that Gale is a nom-de-guerre, because it's a rather silly
coincidence otherwise. Presumably Kathleen Dudman later became Gale, and
Ace adopted this name as a tribute to her. She'd still rather be
Kathleen's daughter than her mum and dad's...

In the end this is quite an interesting book. I've been extremely
rude about it in this review, but at the end of the day it does surprising
things with audacity and more than a little brass neck. The ending really
worked for me (thanks mainly to the Doctor) and it's certainly a million
miles from the formulaic Illegal Alien. It's not what
I'd call a fun read, but it's probably worth your time if you're prepared
to stick at it. I wouldn't want to see a trend of similar books, but as
an occasional one-off it's to be applauded. Strange and different. Yet
another PDA completely unlike the rest of the line. With reservations I'd
recommend it, but it won't be to everyone's taste.

It's inevitable that when a television franchise spends part of four
decades on the air and then continues with a couple hundred feature-length
novels, there's going to be some navel-gazing. Such introspection was pro
forma in the early 1980s when Eric Saward script-edited the program, and
pervaded the final two years of Sylvester McCoy's TV run.

Appearing in just twelve TV features, McCoy's seventh Doctor owned the
early book market, starring in the first 61 New Adventure novels. It took
Rupert Murdoch to kill him off, but he's back for the occasional Past
Doctor BBC story, where the introspection continues.

Matrix treads familiar ground. It aspires to be gothic horror,
the subgenre in which DW found arguably its greatest success. The
novel revisits many issues brought up over the TV show's final four BBC
seasons, and feels similar to a lot of Virgin NAs and MAs (Revelation and Birthright the two
most obvious, though of course there are others, such as Millennial Rites and Time Of Your
Life).

It's also not very good.

Gothic horror, as Doctor Who understands the term, is about
mood. No surprise, then, Matrix is a very moody novel. The
opening scene is DW's grandest cliche -- a faceless, cowled, robe
figure conjures up Something Monstery in a Dank Stone Labyrinth. Next up,
the Doctor and Ace are assaulted by clay monsters (Theatre of War) in an empty lighthouse (Horror of Fang Rock). Later on, we meet two former
companions, whose Doctor-less lives are full of monsters and malaise
(many, many bad novels).

What Matrix wants to be, and almost is, is a complete
deconstruction of the Doctor himself. Deprived of his history, his
companion, even his name, we're left with a present gone awry, and sent
back to the hellish past (here, Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel) where it
all went wrong. Ace is put through the repeated torments usually reserved
for returning companions, not current ones. The Doctor must put his own
identity back together himself (with help from a Mysterious Stranger
plucked from Christian mythology), and defeat the Id Beast which stalks
1888.

There's a six-part episode structure which ill-serves the novel.
There are five arbitrary cliffhangers and 40 chapters, some of which,
curiously, end in an "Out of the fire, back into the frying pan" fashion.
Perhaps the two authors wrote this book in alternating chapters --
impossible endings followed up by improbable resolutions. The upside is
that, without the short chapters, the book would be a lot harder to read.

For all that, Matrix truly is interesting at first. Robert
Perry and Mike Tucker (the latter of whom appears to be staking a claim as
a sole defender of the character of Ace) set up the mood with short,
choppy sentences and short chapters that cover a lot of early ground.
But after a hundred pages, one realizes that, like a 7th Doctor magic
trick (Greatest Show in the Galaxy), there are just
too many balls up in the air, and the ending lets most of them drop freely
out of camera range. Maybe a more coherent, nicer ending, would have made
Matrix more rewarding. But after the last page, unlike other
'Deconstructing Doctor" novels such as Revelation,
Birthright, and even The Eight
Doctors, this cosmos-without-the-Doctor scenario, scarcely bears
thinking about.

DW has produced more than its fair share of dark, gothic
fantasies. It has extensively borrowed from Hammer Horror and its like.
Matrix could well be the definitive dark, gothic fantasy created by
Who Fiction.

The 7th Doctor and Ace arrive in Earth 1963 and meet some old
companions of the Doctor. This is an alternative reality though, and they
travel back to the nexus point - the 1880's. A familiar environ for the
Doctor, yet London seems more dark and gloomy than ever before, thanks to
Tucker and Perry's masterful evocative writing.

The Doctor quite clearly is not himself. He and Ace separate, and the
novel really takes off as the two wander London's streets. The 7th Doctor
was always enigmatic, always mysterious, but he has never been it to this
extreme. Ace's toughness is tested to the limit in this environment - this
is a terrific novel for her as well. The real villain of the piece is a
shocker. A very welcome return for a classic villain.

The whole book is very descriptive, totally gothic. This is Horror
Doctor Who at its most graphic, imaginative and realistic.
Brilliant. 10/10

Matrix is one of those books you`ll either love or hate. What
the highlights of the book are, will be few and far between. By far the
best thing is the atmosphere, which is creepy and gothic. Splitting the
Seventh Doctor and Ace also works well, as does the build up.
Unfortunately what that leads to is ultimately disappointing, as the
return of a certain villain fails to deliver any of the promises the book
makes. This is readable at best, but nothing more or less than that.

This has to be the most New Adventures-y PDA I have ever read and
despite my earlier reservations it is because of their trademarks that it
works so damn well (torturing the Doctor and Ace). On just about every
level this is the most accomplished of the Robert Perry and Mike Tucker
novels, taking on just about every complaint I have ever made about their
work and improving it. The writing is sharp, the plot inspired and the
characterisation consistent and potent. Illegal Alien
is just a distant memory now.

I can understand why readers would be resistant to a book that dwells
on the evil inside the Doctor. For forty years he has long been a beacon
of light, a hero and who are Perry and Tucker to suggest that underneath
his pacifistic veneer lies a cruel and cowardly bastard? Okay that is
simplifying matters but as the last few pages of Matrix reveal the
Doctor does still have some of his dark side inside him, watching his
nemesis fall to his death and doing nothing to avoid it.

Personally I enjoy the thought that the Doctor is just as fallible as
the rest of us when it comes to succumbing to his dark side. After all the
evil he has vanquished in the universe surely his conscience must twinge a
little? Death surrounds him at every turn; his adventures are full of
them, many of which would not occur had he not showed up. Exposed to filth
like the Daleks and Cybermen his homicidal tendencies emerge and there is
no other solution but to murder them. Its an interesting idea and one that
the writers capitalise on to disturb the reader, when the Doctor turns on
Ace and threatens to kill her it might well be the most frightening moment
in the series.

The seventh Doctor is the ideal protagonist to put under the microscope
and explore his darkness because he is (for me) capable of being the
scariest of the lot. It might have something to do with Sylvester McCoy's
performance, when he isn't embarrassing us all goofing around he can be
disturbingly restrained, his growling, Scottish purr a hypnotic nightmare.
Or it could be Andrew Cartmel's decision to inject a little shadow into
his character, the Doctor wiping out the Dalek race, manipulating his
companion to face her fears and taking on the biggest badasses with little
more than his thunderous will (the Gods of Ragnarok, Fenric). The eternal
thinker, planning his adventures way in advance and ignoring casualties in
the face of the greater good.

So seeing him outwitted in the early stages of Matrix is
terrifying. As an unseen force penetrates the TARDIS, the Doctor's own
sanctuary and taunts him out, I was aghast at the possibilities of the
enemy that could shake up the most powerful of Doctors. We hang on to Ace
who is as lost as we are, an ideal method of allowing us to sympathise
with her.

Clever ideas are afoot as the two travellers arrive in 1960s' London
where the Doctor's adventures began all those years ago. But things are
not as they seem, American foot soldiers patrol the streets, gangs of
razor-fisted psychos are on the rampage and old companions Ian and Barbara
have never heard of the Doctor (or Susan Foreman). History has been
screwed and this nightmare version of events we (fans) know so well is
disorienting. As the Doctor investigates the anomaly it appears events
began to change from accepted history in 1888 when the infamous Jack the
Ripper claimed one victim more than he should have, spinning off a wave of
followers for the serial killer who slowly claimed the capital city...

As far as I am concerned the Doctor can visit Victorian London every
day if it is as well written as this. I realise the fascination with that
period has began to wear thin with some crowds (Talons, The Ultimate Foe, Ghost Light, All Consuming Fire, Birthright, The Bodysnatchers, Camera Obscura) but I love the atmosphere it conjours
up... foggy back streets, filthy peasants, horrific murders, top hat and
tails... frankly it is easy to dream up a frightening story in this period
given the archetypes laid down by films and books.

Ingeniously we have the Doctor and Ace split up (a common occurrence in
these Perry/Tucker books) and face the terrors of Victorian London
independent of each other. The middle hundred pages of the book have been
harshly criticized as filling out the book unnecessarily but for me they
were the highlight. We have often experienced the monstrous run-around
with monsters routine and the idea of alternate realities (the first
third) and the Doctor coming to grips with his adversary (the last third)
but the middle section deals with the Doctor and Ace trapped in one time
and forced to make a life for themselves.

Ace's adventures are genuinely gripping; I loved every page of her life
on the run. It's the suspense of all the events that kept me so hooked, as
soon as Ace is taken in by a drunken perv but cannot pay her board you
know they will come to blows. Similarly, her fight with her psychotic
mistress who attacks her daily was inevitable. It is when she comes face
to face with her dark side, the Cheetah personality from Survival, that things get really interesting. She
struggles to keep it under control but is eventually exposed and caged up
to perform in a circus freak show. Here she makes some rather wonderful
friends...

The circus freaks are given a healthy dose of characterisation and it
nice to see secondary characters given this much page space. Everyone,
from Tiny Ron (who is used to lure the Cheetah personality from Ace),
Ackroyd (who resourcefully sneaks her away from the Circus), De Vries (the
mute giant who sacrifices his life to save the others) and Malacroix (the
French circus owner who holds the freaks in his power, politically at
least) spring from the page memorably. But best of all is Jed, the
retarded boy who is one snap away from losing his head and killing
everybody. The writers achieve much sympathy for Jed because he is always
on the edge of understanding what is happening, all he wants to do is
collect pretty things. How he is abused by all quarters is deplorable but
understandable for the time and the writing is razor sharp when we are let
inside Jed's mind. The characters in Matrix all had a purpose,
there are no extraneous characters cluttering up the book.

When it is revealed that the Valeyard is responsible for the Doctor's
descent into madness I was punching the air with delight. I have long
waited for the story that concluded the Doctor's Trial and see him face
his darker, later regeneration again. Suddenly everything snaps into
focus, the only person who could affect the Doctor so terribly is himself.
Earlier imagery is given marvellous explanations, the twelve ghostly
figures writhing around the Valeyard are the distorted, evil versions of
the Doctor's incarnations and the amorphous shadows that have lingered in
the background are the dark side of the Matrix, explaining the title. More
so than the return of the Valeyard, these dark, twisted concepts superbly
bring a sense of continuity and terror to the book.

As ever with these hero/villain stories the climax takes place at a
great height and see them tussling for dear life. It's a great shame that
the Valeyard was killed off because his twisted branch of evil remains as
chilling as it was during the sixth Doctor's era and it's always nice to
be reminded that the Doctor has these thoughts at the back of his mind, on
a leash. The Doctor's parting line to his darker self "Goodbye... Doctor"
is unexpectedly powerful.

Matrix is a superb book, powered by terrifying imagery and
strong characterisation. The Doctor and Ace shine through with their
individual strengths and remain a potent source of storytelling despite
the efforts of the New Adventures to undermine them. This is Doctor
Who at its best, frightening the hell out of people and telling an
atmospheric yarn in the process.

Whoa! That was Dark! With a capital D!! Actually, with a capital ARK,
as well!

DARK!!!

Matrix is a heady mix of Kafka, Lovecraft and Dickens - it's a
gloomy combination of the macabre and grotesque, laden with religious
imagery and nihilistic desolation. It's the book that Neil Penswick's The Pit wanted to be, and the Victorian horror that Mark
Morris's The Bodysnatchers should have been. It's not
cheery Doctor Who - it's very morose, unpleasant, even ghastly in
places.

The Doctor goes through a heck of a psychological, mental and emotional
battering, and to top it all off he has his identity stolen. Once again,
Ace is left on her own, and the narrative, for the most part, empathises
with her, and her reactions to the surrounding environments and
situations. And, I must say, Robert Perry and Mike Tucker have written a
pretty good rendition; they've made her a likable person and one the
reader actually cares about. Her Cheetah conditioning from Survival is used very well; continuitywise this takes
place not long after, and it's woven into the story as an important plot
device - not simply a reference to the televised series, thank
heaven. The incorporation of Ian and Barbara in the alternative 1960s
London is also well handled; they're used to great effect to emphasise the
nightmarish scenario. (It could have been very fanwanky, ala The Face of the Enemy - thankfully it's anything but.
Although the writers get a black mark for the casual mention of Henry
Gordon Jago later on.) All these scenes are disturbing and eerie,
reinforcing the presence of interference in the past. The basic scenario
isn't original (likewise Terrance Dicks's Timewyrm:
Exodus) but at least Perry and Tucker use their imaginations and give
us something slightly different than the usual Nazi-occupied
Britain.

The Victorian London setting, which makes up the majority of the story,
is another bunch of cliches, but value-added with some good ideas. Jack
the Ripper has been mentioned before in Doctor Who, in the same
time and place (The Talons of Weng-Chiang), but in
what's nothing more than a throwaway line. A "successor" to the Ripper,
Springheel Jack, plays a slightly more substantial role in the Edwardian
era story Birthright. However, here, he's the focus
of the adventure; and his presence is felt in a horrific, omnipresent way.

The creepiest moment in the book (and one of the creepiest ever) is the
Doctor's attack on Ace. Some of the most frightening scenes in Doctor
Who occur when it seems that the Doctor has gone bad, either through
possession (The Invisible Enemy) or corruption (The Invasion of Time) or both (Mindwarp). But this scene on the Thames is positively
gut-wrenching.

The rest of the Victorian based scenes have a similarly oppressive
nastiness. And again the writers know what they're doing is hardly
original, but whether it's homage or plagiarism, it's done in the best
possible way. We've got friendly Cockneys congregating in a tavern and a
kind-hearted landlady who's one of the few people to defend the outsider.
Miss Treddle is obviously Miss Havisham, although a hundred times worse.
Add to this a hellfire preacher, an idiot savant, a cruel circus master
and his troupe of freaks, and it's definitely not what you'd call cosy.

On the subject of the freaks, the readers, of course, know that they're
actually people, but the writers also emphasise the way their difference
is exploited to fascinate and disgust "normal" people. The speech
Malacroix makes to the circus visitors on pp.167-168 is very
uncomfortable reading. The unpleasantness continues with the visions that
Jed, Malacroix and Ackroyd undergo when they come into contact with the
TARDIS telepathic circuits. Then there are all the descriptions of the
Doctor's enemy, the wraiths and the crypt; the dead Aces on the
battlefield; and the scenes inside the TARDIS after the Doctor and Ace
escape their encounter at the lighthouse, written with a beautiful Gothic
style that really drives home the dark side to the Doctor's ship, and how
it's not always a safe haven but can instead be a place to fear.

Yes, bright, cheery stuff indeed!

Okay, spoiler alert time. You can't really discuss
Matrix without referring to the final confrontation.
So, if somehow you haven't read any other reviews of
this, and you want to remain in the dark, stop reading
now.

The Valeyard.

You know, I wasn't really surprised by this. In fact, it's obvious very
early on. Nevertheless, the authors build up to the revelation very
stylishly. I was on tenterhooks while reading pages 232-236. But I thought
he was out of bounds for writers of BBC books? (although I'm not sure
when the guidelines were introduced). Anyhow, the final sections of the
book are very good; the Dark Matrix is an interesting idea, with a good
backstory and there's a satisfyingly dramatic climax and resolution.

The characterisations are not the best part of the book, but Ace and
the Doctor are excellent, even though the latter is out of character,
quite literally, for much of the time. And his relationship with his
darker self is astoundingly done - you can really believe he could
eventually become the Valeyard. Of the others, Ackroyd is a wonderful
"nice guy" and Malacroix a sinister villain, who meets with an appropriate
and deserved grisly fate. Liebermann is a rip-off of Jared Khan from Birthright, especially the apocryphal descriptions of
his long journey, but I liked him anyway, and the unresolved ambiguity as
to his identity.

Matrix is one of the best attempts at horror in Doctor
Who fiction. A combination of cliches and other ideas, both from
Who and beyond, are moulded into something incredibly exciting and
readable, thanks to great writing, terrific atmosphere and some truly
disturbing, horrific moments. It's a winner. 9/10

Matrix is a 7th Doctor Past Doctor Adventure and the second in
Mike Tucker and Robert Perry's self-styled series 27. I bought this novel
back in 1998 and disliked it, but now I'm older I'm re-reading it as part
of a complete read-through; as a fan favourite, I'm hoping my opinions
have changed.

The story of Matrix is fairly complex, and it is no wonder why I
didn't like it at release. It fits in with the story type of series 26, in
that there is a story there deep down, but it's confusing as anything and
doesn't make a whole lot of sense at first glance. As this was meant to be
set in the fictional series 27, it's a little disappointing, as the first
story, Illegal Alien, was just a joyous romp with a
fairly straightforward plotline. The novel starts with the villain doing a
ritual to make a golem and then attacking the Doctor with it when he is at
his weakest before the TARDIS is hi-jacked and the Doctor shown to be
fearful of whomever is behind it. Meanwhile, Ace seems to be falling under
the influence of the Cheetah planet (from Survival)
and the villain is shown to be committing a murder in Victorian times. The
pieces are not obviously linked; linking them seems a little bit
convoluted and screams that the authors had so many ideas they just tried
to shoe-horn as many into one novel as possible.

Matrix then moves on with the Doctor planning to leave Ace with
his first self in 1963 but arrives to find a city under attack from
zombies and a version of Barbara and Ian who don't know who he is. This
bit is very well done and although the zombies again appear shoe-horned
in, they make a little more sense than the golem due to Barbara giving us
a history of the Ripper murders and the presence of "Jack" throughout
history since. Other than bearing more than a slight similarity to Jack o'
the Green from the previous 7th Doctor novel, I really enjoyed this bit
and thought it as a very good idea.

The novel then shifts again to the Victorian era of the Ripper murders,
with the TARDIS crew attempting to stop the 6th murder, which should never
have happened. Unfortunately, the Doctor turns evil and tries to kill Ace,
only coming to his senses just in time to have her run away from him. All
this is watched by an idiot boy called Jed who retrieves the telepathic
circuit the Doctor threw into the Thames (presumably this was how the
villain controlled the Doctor) and then runs off to Malacroix's circus to
tell him what he saw. I'm a sucker for a good old Victorian setting and
Tucker/Perry have done themselves proud in capturing the era on the page.
The bulk of the novel is set here, and the people and the era really do
come alive on the page. The trouble is, all this good work is then undone
by the final pages of the book revealing the whole novel to be a contrived
plot by the Valeyard to become whole using the Dark Matrix, and it goes
from an entertaining semi-historical piece, to all-out Gallifreyan
fanwank. I don't mind semi-historical novels and I don't mind novels
delving into the fictional Time Lord history, but here they clash badly.

There is no denying that Tucker and Perry can write for the 7th Doctor;
they do it very well indeed, as Illegal Alien proved.
Matrix, however, features a sombre 7th Doctor who spends the best
part of the novel depressed, scared and/or not himself. Whilst it adds
depth to the character, it's not really the sort of Doctor I like to read
about and I felt the presence of a "Doctor" character was missed.

Ace gets separated from the Doctor again, which is really starting to
annoy me as it happened previously in both Illegal
Alien and The Hollow Men. Whilst it's nice to see
things through the companion's eyes every once in a while, it's also nice
to see the Doctor and his companion work together. As previously
mentioned, Ace also succumbs to the Cheetah influence, a plot device
needed to gain the circus's interest but one I didn't think good in Survival and its re-emergence here did little for me,
especially as it was all revealed to be in her head, despite taking in
third parties (such as Malacroix).

The obvious character of note is the Valeyard who's behind the entire
state of affairs by trying to become whole again. Matrix starts
with just having him as an unnamed villain who has obvious connections to
the past of the Doctor. Personally, I feel this is one of the PDAs that
would have benefited from announcing the Valeyard was the villain from the
offset as at least that would be one less confusing plot thread to think
about whilst reading. The trouble with the portrayal of the Valeyard here
is that very little he does makes sense. Why create golems to attack to
the Doctor when you can hi-jack the TARDIS anyway? How does he "get" the
5th Doctor by getting him to keep the antidote for himself yet struggle to
obtain the 7th who is quite happy destroying Skaro? The final few pages
when it's essentially the Valeyard vs the Doctor work well, but all his
other plotting is really hard to take seriously.

The other characters are all pretty much as you'd expect, the majority
being Victorian stereotypes. All are believable and are built up enough to
be interesting to read about. Standouts include the simpleton Jed, the
circus-master Malacroix and the Wandering Jew but the majority of
characters are brilliantly done.

Matrix is a pretty gloomy and grim novel, which makes the smoggy
London of Victorian times the perfect setting. It has strong ideas and
really pushes forward the backstory of the Matrix and also the idea
of a dark Doctor but never quite reaches what it sets out to do by simply
throwing far too many ideas at you all at once. It makes for a dark and
atmospheric novel, thanks in part to the wonderful Victorian setting, but
its plot takes a lot to follow and asks you to believe some pretty
outrageous and contrived plot devices, which seriously detracts from what
otherwise could have been a great novel.